Fictional Women on the Brink

Works of fiction featuring women teetering on the edge of sanity, women upended by rage, and women who throw in the towel have been with us for a while.  Classics like The Yellow Wallpaper and The Awakening are firmly established in the literary canon and, in turn, inspired works like The Bell Jar.  Alas, the patriarchy is still with us, and women continue to find themselves boxed into marriages and motherhood, fulfilling expectations that throttle aspirations and desires, while the faint odor of misogyny remains in the air. These stories feel authentic and offer catharsis and validation. There has been a good crop of them recently, so it feels like a good time to highlight a few here. 

Rachel Yoder's Nightbitch, which was recently adapted for the big screen, convincingly captures the monotony and exhaustion of motherhood in this novel about a previously ambitious artist, now weary stay-at-home mom who starts to metamorphize into a dog. This entertaining Kafkaesque novel is darkly funny offering a subversively satisfying take on modern motherhood and has a striking cover to boot.

"Then I married a man, as women do. My life became archetypal, a drag show of nuclear familyhood," Jane notes. "I floated face down in housewifery," she ruminates in Liars. Author and poet Sarah Manguso offers readers a blistering portrait of a woman undone by her marriage written in stunning prose. While Jane's male partner, John, is burned to the ground in this one, readers will also glean that Jane is not an entirely reliable narrator in this wallop of a novel. 

The Most by Jessica Anthony spans one Sunday in 1950s Delaware when Kathleen Beckett tells her husband to take the children to church without her, puts on her swimsuit, gets into their apartment complex's pool and refuses to get out. Anthony's powerful, taut domestic drama runs less than 150 pages.

Finally, Elena Ferrante's The Days of Abandonment is over a couple decade old now but was included in New York Times' Best Books of the 21st Century and remains popular with readers. An unsentimental portrait of Olga, a middle-aged mother of two young children, when abandoned by her husband, prompts one of the most visceral mental breakdowns in literary history.